Junnan Dong

Qinggang Zhang, Junnan Dong, Keyu Duan et al.

Knowledge Graph (KG) errors introduce non-negligible noise, severely affecting KG-related downstream tasks. Detecting errors in KGs is challenging since the patterns of errors are unknown and diverse, while ground-truth labels are rare or even unavailable. A traditional solution is to construct logical rules to verify triples, but it is not generalizable since different KGs have distinct rules with domain knowledge involved. Recent studies focus on designing tailored detectors or ranking triples based on KG embedding loss. However, they all rely on negative samples for training, which are generated by randomly replacing the head or tail entity of existing triples. Such a negative sampling strategy is not enough for prototyping practical KG errors, e.g., (Bruce_Lee, place_of_birth, China), in which the three elements are often relevant, although mismatched. We desire a more effective unsupervised learning mechanism tailored for KG error detection. To this end, we propose a novel framework - ContrAstive knowledge Graph Error Detection (CAGED). It introduces contrastive learning into KG learning and provides a novel way of modeling KG. Instead of following the traditional setting, i.e., considering entities as nodes and relations as semantic edges, CAGED augments a KG into different hyper-views, by regarding each relational triple as a node. After joint training with KG embedding and contrastive learning loss, CAGED assesses the trustworthiness of each triple based on two learning signals, i.e., the consistency of triple representations across multi-views and the self-consistency within the triple. Extensive experiments on three real-world KGs show that CAGED outperforms state-of-the-art methods in KG error detection. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Qing145/CAGED.git.

Junru Lu, Jiarui Qin, Lingfeng Qiao et al.

We introduce Youtu-LLM, a lightweight yet powerful language model that harmonizes high computational efficiency with native agentic intelligence. Unlike typical small models that rely on distillation, Youtu-LLM (1.96B) is pre-trained from scratch to systematically cultivate reasoning and planning capabilities. The key technical advancements are as follows: (1) Compact Architecture with Long-Context Support: Built on a dense Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) architecture with a novel STEM-oriented vocabulary, Youtu-LLM supports a 128k context window. This design enables robust long-context reasoning and state tracking within a minimal memory footprint, making it ideal for long-horizon agent and reasoning tasks. (2) Principled "Commonsense-STEM-Agent" Curriculum: We curated a massive corpus of approximately 11T tokens and implemented a multi-stage training strategy. By progressively shifting the pre-training data distribution from general commonsense to complex STEM and agentic tasks, we ensure the model acquires deep cognitive abilities rather than superficial alignment. (3) Scalable Agentic Mid-training: Specifically for the agentic mid-training, we employ diverse data construction schemes to synthesize rich and varied trajectories across math, coding, and tool-use domains. This high-quality data enables the model to internalize planning and reflection behaviors effectively. Extensive evaluations show that Youtu-LLM sets a new state-of-the-art for sub-2B LLMs. On general benchmarks, it achieves competitive performance against larger models, while on agent-specific tasks, it significantly surpasses existing SOTA baselines, demonstrating that lightweight models can possess strong intrinsic agentic capabilities.

Siyu An, Junru Lu, Junnan Dong et al.

Multimodal modeling represents a vital step from modality-agnostic reasoning toward world modeling. While early approaches predominantly rely on late-fusion that assembles encoders and frozen language backbones with output heads, recent efforts have shifted the paradigm toward native multimodal modeling (NMM) with the intrinsic integration of modalities for superior multimodal performance. Despite its potential, the design space of native architectures remains insufficiently defined. In this paper, we present the community with a formalized roadmap for this transition. Specifically, we formally define the architectural nativity, distinguishing mid-fusion and early-fusion from non-native paradigms. We further organize the existing native models through the lens of input-output duality into three categories: (i) Multi-to-Text for cross-modal comprehension with text-only output; (ii) Multi-to-Target for scenario-oriented generation, e.g., image, audio and video generation, and (iii) Multi-to-Multi for unified modeling with symmetric input-output. We deliver a comprehensive and industrial-grade investigation into the transition toward the definitive NMM framework, where understanding and generation seamlessly coexist within a unified transformer paradigm. We systematically unpack the end-to-end pipeline from industrial perspectives from architectural coordination, massive data curation, to full-stack training recipes, inference & deployment, and the comprehensive evaluation for truly native modeling.

Qinggang Zhang, Shengyuan Chen, Yuanchen Bei et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in a wide range of tasks, yet their application to specialized domains remains challenging due to the need for deep expertise. Retrieval-Augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution to customize LLMs for professional fields by seamlessly integrating external knowledge bases, enabling real-time access to domain-specific expertise during inference. Despite its potential, traditional RAG systems, based on flat text retrieval, face three critical challenges: (i) complex query understanding in professional contexts, (ii) difficulties in knowledge integration across distributed sources, and (iii) system efficiency bottlenecks at scale. This survey presents a systematic analysis of Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG), a new paradigm that revolutionizes domain-specific LLM applications. GraphRAG addresses traditional RAG limitations through three key innovations: (i) graph-structured knowledge representation that explicitly captures entity relationships and domain hierarchies, (ii) efficient graph-based retrieval techniques that enable context-preserving knowledge retrieval with multihop reasoning ability, and (iii) structure-aware knowledge integration algorithms that leverage retrieved knowledge for accurate and logical coherent generation of LLMs. In this survey, we systematically analyze the technical foundations of GraphRAG and examine current implementations across various professional domains, identifying key technical challenges and promising research directions. All the related resources of GraphRAG, including research papers, open-source data, and projects, are collected for the community in https://github.com/DEEP-PolyU/Awesome-GraphRAG.

Zhu Wang, Junnan Dong, Shuang Zhou et al.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) is widely applied in many areas, such as financial fraud detection and social spammer detection. Anomalous nodes in the graph not only impact their own communities but also create a ripple effect on neighbors throughout the graph structure. Detecting anomalous nodes in complex graphs has been a challenging task. While existing GAD methods assume all labels are correct, real-world scenarios often involve inaccurate annotations. These noisy labels can severely degrade GAD performance because, with anomalies representing a minority class, even a small number of mislabeled instances can disproportionately interfere with detection models. Cutting edges to mitigate the negative effects of noisy labels is a good option; however, it has both positive and negative influences and also presents an issue of weak supervision. To perform effective GAD with noisy labels, we propose REinforced Graph Anomaly Detector (REGAD) by pruning the edges of candidate nodes potentially with mistaken labels. Moreover, we design the performance feedback based on strategically crafted confident labels to guide the cutting process, ensuring optimal results. Specifically, REGAD contains two novel components. (i) A tailored policy network, which involves two-step actions to remove negative effect propagation step by step. (ii) A policy-in-the-loop mechanism to identify suitable edge removal strategies that control the propagation of noise on the graph and estimate the updated structure to obtain reliable pseudo labels iteratively. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that REGAD outperforms all baselines under different noisy ratios.

Junnan Dong, Chuang Zhou, Zheng Yuan et al.

Large language models often struggle with complex long-horizon analytical tasks over unstructured tables, which typically feature hierarchical and bidirectional headers and non-canonical layouts. We formalize this challenge as Deep Tabular Research (DTR), requiring multi-step reasoning over interdependent table regions. To address DTR, we propose a novel agentic framework that treats tabular reasoning as a closed-loop decision-making process. We carefully design a coupled query and table comprehension for path decision making and operational execution. Specifically, (i) DTR first constructs a hierarchical meta graph to capture bidirectional semantics, mapping natural language queries into an operation-level search space; (ii) To navigate this space, we introduce an expectation-aware selection policy that prioritizes high-utility execution paths; (iii) Crucially, historical execution outcomes are synthesized into a siamese structured memory, i.e., parameterized updates and abstracted texts, enabling continual refinement. Extensive experiments on challenging unstructured tabular benchmarks verify the effectiveness and highlight the necessity of separating strategic planning from low-level execution for long-horizon tabular reasoning.

Yinghui Li, Jiayi Kuang, Peng Xing et al.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in interpreting natural scenes, their ability to process discrete symbols -- the fundamental building blocks of human cognition -- remains a critical open question. Unlike continuous visual data, symbols such as mathematical formulas, chemical structures, and linguistic characters require precise, deeper interpretation. This paper introduces a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate how top-tier MLLMs navigate these "discrete semantic spaces" across five domains: language, culture, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Our investigation uncovers a counterintuitive phenomenon: models often fail at basic symbol recognition yet succeed in complex reasoning tasks, suggesting they rely on linguistic probability rather than true visual perception. By exposing this "cognitive mismatch", we highlight a significant gap in current AI capabilities: the struggle to truly perceive and understand the symbolic languages that underpin scientific discovery and abstract thought. This work offers a roadmap for developing more rigorous, human-aligned intelligent systems.

Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Qinggang Zhang et al.

Generating accurate SQL from users' natural language questions (text-to-SQL) remains a long-standing challenge due to the complexities involved in user question understanding, database schema comprehension, and SQL generation. Traditional text-to-SQL systems, which combine human engineering and deep neural networks, have made significant progress. Subsequently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been developed for text-to-SQL tasks, achieving promising results. However, as modern databases and user questions grow more complex, PLMs with a limited parameter size often produce incorrect SQL. This necessitates more sophisticated and tailored optimization methods, which restricts the application of PLM-based systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown significant capabilities in natural language understanding as model scale increases. Thus, integrating LLM-based solutions can bring unique opportunities, improvements, and solutions to text-to-SQL research. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing LLM-based text-to-SQL studies. Specifically, we offer a brief overview of the technical challenges and evolutionary process of text-to-SQL. Next, we introduce the datasets and metrics designed to evaluate text-to-SQL systems. Subsequently, we present a systematic analysis of recent advances in LLM-based text-to-SQL. Finally, we make a summarization and discuss the remaining challenges in this field and suggest expectations for future research directions. All the related resources of LLM-based, including research papers, benchmarks, and open-source projects, are collected for the community in our repository: https://github.com/DEEP-PolyU/Awesome-LLM-based-Text2SQL.

Qinggang Zhang, Junnan Dong, Hao Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in many real-world applications. Nonetheless, LLMs are often criticized for their tendency to produce hallucinations, wherein the models fabricate incorrect statements on tasks beyond their knowledge and perception. To alleviate this issue, researchers have explored leveraging the factual knowledge in knowledge graphs (KGs) to ground the LLM's responses in established facts and principles. However, most state-of-the-art LLMs are closed-source, making it challenging to develop a prompting framework that can efficiently and effectively integrate KGs into LLMs with hard prompts only. Generally, existing KG-enhanced LLMs usually suffer from three critical issues, including huge search space, high API costs, and laborious prompt engineering, that impede their widespread application in practice. To this end, we introduce a novel Knowledge Graph based PrompTing framework, namely KnowGPT, to enhance LLMs with domain knowledge. KnowGPT contains a knowledge extraction module to extract the most informative knowledge from KGs, and a context-aware prompt construction module to automatically convert extracted knowledge into effective prompts. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that KnowGPT significantly outperforms all competitors. Notably, KnowGPT achieves a 92.6% accuracy on OpenbookQA leaderboard, comparable to human-level performance.

Junnan Dong, Qinggang Zhang, Huachi Zhou et al.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KVQA) has been extensively studied to answer visual questions with external knowledge, e.g., knowledge graphs (KGs). While several attempts have been proposed to leverage large language models (LLMs) as an implicit knowledge source, it remains challenging since LLMs may generate hallucinations. Moreover, multiple knowledge sources, e.g., images, KGs and LLMs, cannot be readily aligned for complex scenarios. To tackle these, we present a novel modality-aware integration with LLMs for KVQA (MAIL). It carefully leverages multimodal knowledge for both image understanding and knowledge reasoning. Specifically, (i) we propose a two-stage prompting strategy with LLMs to densely embody the image into a scene graph with detailed visual features; (ii) We construct a coupled concept graph by linking the mentioned entities with external facts. (iii) A tailored pseudo-siamese graph medium fusion is designed for sufficient multimodal fusion. We utilize the shared mentioned entities in two graphs as mediums to bridge a tight inter-modal exchange, while maximally preserving insightful intra-modal learning by constraining the fusion within mediums. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show the superiority of MAIL with 24x less resources.

Yilin Xiao, Junnan Dong, Chuang Zhou et al.

Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) has garnered increasing recognition for its potential to enhance large language models (LLMs) by structurally organizing domain-specific corpora and facilitating complex reasoning. However, current evaluations of GraphRAG models predominantly rely on traditional question-answering datasets. Their limited scope in questions and evaluation metrics fails to comprehensively assess the reasoning capacity improvements enabled by GraphRAG models. To address this gap, we introduce GraphRAG-Bench, a large-scale, domain-specific benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate GraphRAG models. Our benchmark offers three key superiorities: \((i)\) Challenging question design. Featuring college-level, domain-specific questions that demand multi-hop reasoning, the benchmark ensures that simple content retrieval is insufficient for problem-solving. For example, some questions require mathematical reasoning or programming. \((ii)\) Diverse task coverage. The dataset includes a broad spectrum of reasoning tasks, multiple-choice, true/false, multi-select, open-ended, and fill-in-the-blank. It spans 16 disciplines in twenty core textbooks. \((iii)\) Holistic evaluation framework. GraphRAG-Bench provides comprehensive assessment across the entire GraphRAG pipeline, including graph construction, knowledge retrieval, and answer generation. Beyond final-answer correctness, it evaluates the logical coherence of the reasoning process. By applying nine contemporary GraphRAG methods to GraphRAG-Bench, we demonstrate its utility in quantifying how graph-based structuring improves model reasoning capabilities. Our analysis reveals critical insights about graph architectures, retrieval efficacy, and reasoning capabilities, offering actionable guidance for the research community.

Zijin Hong, Hao Wu, Su Dong et al.

Recent studies have raised significant concerns regarding the reliability of current mathematics benchmarks, highlighting issues such as simplistic design and potential data contamination. Consequently, developing a reliable benchmark that effectively evaluates large language models' (LLMs) genuine capabilities in mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge. To address these concerns, we propose RV-Bench, a novel evaluation methodology for Benchmarking LLMs with Random Variables in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we build question-generating functions to produce random variable questions (RVQs), whose background content mirrors original benchmark problems, but with randomized variable combinations, rendering them "unseen" to LLMs. Models must completely understand the inherent question pattern to correctly answer RVQs with diverse variable combinations. Thus, an LLM's genuine reasoning capability is reflected through its accuracy and robustness on RV-Bench. We conducted extensive experiments on over 30 representative LLMs across more than 1,000 RVQs. Our findings propose that LLMs exhibit a proficiency imbalance between encountered and ``unseen'' data distributions. Furthermore, RV-Bench reveals that proficiency generalization across similar mathematical reasoning tasks is limited, but we verified it can still be effectively elicited through test-time scaling.

Junnan Dong, Zijin Hong, Yuanchen Bei et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable performance across various language understanding tasks. While emerging benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate LLMs in various domains such as mathematics and computer science, they merely measure the accuracy in terms of the final prediction on multi-choice questions. However, it remains insufficient to verify the essential understanding of LLMs given a chosen choice. To fill this gap, we present CLR-Bench to comprehensively evaluate the LLMs in complex college-level reasoning. Specifically, (i) we prioritize 16 challenging college disciplines in computer science and artificial intelligence. The dataset contains 5 types of questions, while each question is associated with detailed explanations from experts. (ii) To quantify a fair evaluation of LLMs' reasoning ability, we formalize the criteria with two novel metrics. Q$\rightarrow$A is utilized to measure the performance of direct answer prediction, and Q$\rightarrow$AR effectively considers the joint ability to answer the question and provide rationale simultaneously. Extensive experiments are conducted with 40 LLMs over 1,018 discipline-specific questions. The results demonstrate the key insights that LLMs, even the best closed-source LLM, i.e., GPT-4 turbo, tend to `guess' the college-level answers. It shows a dramatic decrease in accuracy from 63.31% Q$\rightarrow$A to 39.00% Q$\rightarrow$AR, indicating an unsatisfactory reasoning ability.

Linhao Luo, Zicheng Zhao, Junnan Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning but remain limited by static and incomplete parametric knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates this by incorporating external knowledge, yet existing RAGs struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks due to fragmented information and weak modeling of knowledge structure. Graphs offer a natural way to model relationships within knowledge, but LLMs are inherently unstructured and cannot effectively reason over graph-structured data. Recent graph-enhanced RAG (GraphRAG) attempts to bridge this gap by constructing tailored graphs and enabling LLMs to reason on them. However, these methods often depend on ad-hoc graph designs, heuristic search, or costly agent pipelines, which hinder scalability and generalization. To address these challenges, we present G-reasoner, a unified framework that integrates graph and language foundation models for reasoning over diverse graph-structured knowledge. Central to our approach is QuadGraph, a standardized four-layer abstraction that unifies heterogeneous knowledge sources into a common graph representation. Building on this, we introduce a 34M-parameter graph foundation model (GFM) that jointly captures graph topology and textual semantics, and is integrated with LLMs to enhance reasoning in downstream applications. To ensure scalability and efficiency, mixed-precision training and distributed message-passing are implemented to scale GFM with more GPUs. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that G-reasoner consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, significantly enhances LLM reasoning, and achieves strong efficiency and cross-graph generalization.

Qinggang Zhang, Keyu Duan, Junnan Dong et al.

Inductive knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer the missing relation for a set of newly-coming entities that never appeared in the training set. Such a setting is more in line with reality, as real-world KGs are constantly evolving and introducing new knowledge. Recent studies have shown promising results using message passing over subgraphs to embed newly-coming entities for inductive KGC. However, the inductive capability of these methods is usually limited by two key issues. (i) KGC always suffers from data sparsity, and the situation is even exacerbated in inductive KGC where new entities often have few or no connections to the original KG. (ii) Cold-start problem. It is over coarse-grained for accurate KG reasoning to generate representations for new entities by gathering the local information from few neighbors. To this end, we propose a novel iNfOmax RelAtion Network, namely NORAN, for inductive KG completion. It aims to mine latent relation patterns for inductive KG completion. Specifically, by centering on relations, NORAN provides a hyper view towards KG modeling, where the correlations between relations can be naturally captured as entity-independent logical evidence to conduct inductive KGC. Extensive experiment results on five benchmarks show that our framework substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art KGC methods.

Qinggang Zhang, Hao Chen, Junnan Dong et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in bridging the gap between natural language queries and database management systems, enabling users to interact with databases without the background of SQL. However, LLMs often struggle to comprehend complex database structures and accurately interpret user intentions. Decomposition-based methods have been proposed to enhance the performance of LLMs on complex tasks, but decomposing SQL generation into subtasks is non-trivial due to the declarative structure of SQL syntax and the intricate connections between query concepts and database elements. In this paper, we propose a novel Structure GUided text-to-SQL framework~(SGU-SQL) that incorporates syntax-based prompting to enhance the SQL generation capabilities of LLMs. Specifically, SGU-SQL establishes structure-aware links between user queries and database schema and decomposes the complex generation task using syntax-based prompting to enable more accurate LLM-based SQL generation. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that SGU-SQL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art text-to-SQL models.